Statistics and the Public Sphere. Numbers and the People in Modern Britain,c. 1800–2000

Susan Elizabeth Ramírez, The World Upside Down. Cross‐Cultural Contact and Conflict in Sixteenth‐Century Peru (1996), vii + 234 (Stanford University Press, Stanford, £45.00).

Biography Database, 1680–1830: Personal Edition (1997; a rerelease of the 1995 institutional edition with updated software) (Romulus Press Ltd with the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 91.83/$125).

Martin Hewitt, The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester, 1832–67 (1996), ix + 335 (Scolar Press, Aldershot, £45.00/$74.95).

Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (1998), xiii + 487 (University of California Press, Berkeley, £35.00/$45.00).

Kevin Passmore, From Liberalism to Fascism: The Right in a French Province, 1928–1939 (1997), xvii + 333 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £40.00/$59.95).     

Consumption and poverty in the homes of the English poor,c. 1670–1834

The consumer behaviour of the poor in the long eighteenth century has attracted more historical attention in recent years. Yet, we have little understanding of whether regional factors affected consumption or how the poor’s ownership of household goods was influenced by level of poverty and the life-cycle. By focusing on Kent and drawing comparisons to other counties, this article argues that the material lives of the poor were improving by the late eighteenth century, but finds that there were distinct regional differences as the poor acquired more and better goods in London and the Home Counties than in relatively remote areas. Moreover, by using pauper inventories and labourers’ probate inventories, the research finds that the poor were not a homogeneous group with similar levels of material wealth, but should be considered in terms of different subgroups which often led very different material lives to one another due to life-cycle-related problems including sickness and old age. Labourers’ probate inventories are found to represent a minority of the poor who were materially richer than most, whilst pauper inventories appear to represent a more typical subgroup of the poor that struggled to make do and owned most types of goods in smaller numbers.     

Wu Fuhui:Chinese Fiction Theory and Writing in the 1930s

The1920sand1930swereagoldenageforChinesefiction.Afterundergoingagreatmodernizingtransformati0n,MayFourthfictiongraduallymaturedandbecamemoreincisive.Theemergenceofthatbodyofmutuallyinfluencing,defining,andconflictingfictiontheory,criticism,andwritinginthe…     

Negotiating needletime: the Musicians’ Union,the BBC and the record companies,c. 1920–1990

This article examines an important, but hitherto largely overlooked, licensing system which operated in the UK between the late 1920s and late 1980s and limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in radio progammes. Known as ‘needletime’ the system was formalized in the 1930s when the BBC reached a collective agreement with the UK’s record companies – here acting via the copyright licensing society Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) – about the amount of records that it could play. Drawing on previously unused materials, the article provides a revisionist account of the development of needletime, focusing on the actions of a third party, the Musicians’ Union (MU). As is shown, the MU was able to exercise influence on both camps and thus to have a profound impact on the development of music radio and the wider music industries in the UK. Previous accounts of needletime are critiqued and it is suggested that, while it was accused of operating ‘restrictive practices’, the MU’s role can be seen more as an attempt to ensure that the suitably remunerated employment of musicians was as widespread as possible. Needletime emerges as perhaps the key agreement thus far within the UK’s music industries’ industrial relations.     

Comfort in English and Swedish country houses,c.1760–1820

Comfort as an idea and ideal has attracted growing interest, especially in an Anglo-American context. Much of the discussion has centred either on improvements in physical comfort, not least through new technologies, or on emotional comfort and the social construction of the home. This article brings together these ideas in a comparative analysis of English and Swedish landowners. It draws on a range of correspondence to uncover more about the ways in which members of the elite themselves conceived and achieved comfort in very different geographical, economic and cultural contexts. Whilst ‘English comfort’ became widespread as an idealization of elite lifestyles by the early nineteenth century, both in Sweden and elsewhere, we argue that many of its social and physical imperatives were commonplace much earlier. This involved shared concerns with warmth and airiness, and the ways in which these were linked to health and well-being, but also with the construction of appropriate social settings. Yet, it was the emotional and non-material dimensions of comfort that dominated the correspondence in both countries: a concern with family and with home as a place defined by relationships with people rather than things.     

Play streets: women,children and the problem of urban traffic, 1930–1970

This article explores women’s participation in campaigns for urban play streets in England c.1930–1970. Concentrating on activities in ‘traditional’ terraced streets, it argues that working-class street sociability was strongly connected to children’s play and that rising levels of traffic were beginning to threaten this before the Second World War, feeding growing anxieties over the high rate of road accidents to children. One response to this from the 1930s was a series of local experiments aimed at separating traffic from children (a radical alternative to the more usual response of keeping children away from traffic) through the creation of ‘play streets’, closed to traffic for much of the day. The idea was taken up by national government and became popular in post-war decades, often due to the efforts of local women to defend the public life of their communities. The growing controversy over the introduction and maintenance of play streets from the 1960s shows women struggling to maintain traditional street sociability against the gathering power of business interests and rising car ownership in the period.